We're excited to announce our biggest sale of the year to celebrate Visual Composer's Birthday anniversary! From June 17 to June 28, you can get up to 50% off on all our premium licenses and upgrades. This is the best time to upgrade your plan with our powerful website builder and access all premium features.

Sale Details

• Date valid: From June 17 to June 28, 2024
• Discounts: Up to 50% off all Visual Composer premium licenses:
  • 30% OFF Single for 1 website – Save $14.70
  • 40% OFF Plus for 5 websites – Save $39.60
  • 30% OFF Accelerate for 20 websites – Save $44.70
  • 50% OFF Agency for 1000 websites – Save $174.50
  • 20% OFF Lifetime for 1 website – Save $29.80

Premium Features Included

Every premium license comes with powerful features to make your website creation process better:

• Drag & Drop Builder – Easily create your website by dragging and dropping elements where you want them.
• 300+ Content Elements – Choose from over 300 elements like text, images, buttons, and more to build your site.
• 200+ Templates – Start quickly with more than 200 pre-designed templates that you can customize.
• Font Manager – Access a wide range of fonts to make your site look just the way you want.
• Theme Builder – Design and customize every part of your theme, including headers, footers, and sidebars.
• Popup Builder – Create engaging popups to capture visitors' attention and grow your audience.
• Insights Analytics – Get real-time analytics to improve your SEO rankings & website performance.
• Free Stock Images – Use a library of hundreds of thousands of high-quality, and fully-licensed free stock images.
• Premium Support – Get priority support from our expert team whenever you need help.

Discounts on Upgrades

Already using Visual Composer Premium? Upgrade to a higher plan during the sale and pay only the difference! This is a great chance to get more licenses and support your growth.

Visual Composer Hosted on Indystack

For just $24.99/month, get Visual Composer hosted on Indystack Cloud Hosting for WordPress, which includes:

• A free Visual Composer premium license – free forever
• Free migration
• Free SSL certificate
• 24/7 support
• 99.9% uptime
• Free trial & many more amazing features

Not convinced yet? Take a look at just one of the examples of a website's performance results after migrating to Indystack.

Before migration:

After migration:

No Risk, All Rewards

All our premium plans include all premium features, priority support, free updates, and a 30-day money-back guarantee. There’s no risk in trying Visual Composer Premium and seeing the big difference it can make for your website and business.

Don’t miss out on this incredible sale! Mark your calendar and upgrade to Visual Composer premium from June 17 to June 28 to enjoy these exclusive discounts.

Stay tuned for more updates and let's celebrate another 13 amazing years with Visual Composer!

In a world where technology and environmental sustainability are becoming increasingly intertwined, Visual Composer is joining the WordPress Gives A Hand movement for the 4th year in a row. In 2023, we will donate to One Tree Planted - an organization whose main focus is the global restoration of forests.

If this is your first time hearing about the movement - WordPress Gives A Hand is a global initiative that brings together businesses, organizations, and individuals associated with the WordPress ecosystem. Each partner chooses a cause close to them and donates part of their revenue during the charity event. This year it’s from December 25th to December 31st.

Why Trees Matter

This year we chose to support One Tree Planted, a non-profit organization dedicated to global reforestation.

Trees play a crucial role in maintaining the balance of our ecosystem and over the years deforestation has made an impact on climate change. It has been destroying the homes of more than half the world's land-based plants and animals, and three-quarters of all birds. So one way to reduce the damage is by planting more trees and One Tree Planted is doing just that.

Trees Planted Over The Years

Source: One Tree Planted

One Tree Planted has planted over 92.7 million trees in more than 80 countries since 2014 and we’re proud to be part of the future of reforestation.

How You Can Contribute

You can join Visual Composer and other WordPress community members and be a part of this collective effort.

By purchasing Visual Composer for your website building needs during the last full week of the year, you are indirectly contributing to the WordPress Gives A Hand movement and supporting the valuable work of One Tree Planted.

Here are other WordPress companies joining WordPress Gives a hand this year. By purchasing from any of them, you’ll be part of our collective movement.

• WPBakery is donating to One Tree Planted
• Indystack is donating to SOS Children’s Village Croatia
• WPCommerz is donateing to UNICEF
• Amelia, wpDataTables, Trafft, and WPAleks are donating to Budi Human
• Themeisle is donating to Akshaya Patra
• PublishPress is donating to The Narwhal
• CatFolders is donating to Idea Hub Nepal
• Brandy by YayCommerce is donating to Society Path
• TranslatePress and Cozmoslabs are donating to SOS Children's Villages Romania
• YITH is donating to One Tree Planted
• And last but not least, LeDetailWP is donating to Onward Eugene

Let’s create positive change together, one tree at a time

Visual Composer's participation in the WordPress Gives A Hand movement marks a significant step towards a more sustainable and environmentally conscious future. As businesses increasingly recognize the importance of corporate social responsibility, the WordPress community sets a great example by intertwining technological innovation with a commitment to preserving our planet for future generations.

Keep an eye out for upcoming updates, and let's create a lasting impact together!

We're thrilled to introduce you to Ultimate Addons for Visual Composer, a game-changing addon that extends and enhances the functionality of the Visual Composer Website Builder. It gives you access to an impressive library of additional elements, templates, blocks, and more.

In this blog post, we'll explore its features, provide a step-by-step guide on getting started, and take you behind the scenes of the fascinating journey of bringing this remarkable add-on to life, directly from the creators themselves.

Discovering Ultimate Addons for Visual Composer

Let's start with what matters most — the features.

Elements and Extensions: Expanding Your Design Arsenal

One of the standout features of Ultimate Addons for Visual Composer is its extensive library of over 150 elements and extensions. From advanced post grids and captivating content elements to interactive containers and eye-catching e-commerce pricing tables, these additions open up a world of possibilities for enhancing your website's look and functionality.

And the best part? You can customize these elements to perfectly align with your brand's unique style, ensuring a seamless integration into your website's aesthetics.

Templates: Streamlining Your Design Process

It doesn't just stop at elements and extensions. Ultimate Addons for Visual Composer offers over 225 pre-designed templates. Crafted with expertise, these templates cater to a wide range of industries and niches. Whether you need a stunning landing page, an elegant portfolio showcase, or a simple blog layout, these templates have got you covered.

With just a few clicks, you can have a professional-looking page up and running. These templates save you time and ensure your website leaves a lasting impression.

Blocks: Elevating the Visual Experience

Creating an immersive web experience has never been easier. Thanks to Ultimate Addons' collection of over 390 professionally designed blocks, you can effortlessly captivate your website visitors.

These blocks are not just visually striking, they're built with responsiveness in mind. This means your design layouts will shine on any device, whether it's a desktop, tablet, or mobile phone.

Unmatched Value: Empowering Your Web Journey

Now, let's talk value. Ultimate Addons doesn't just provide you with an exceptional toolkit for website building and design, it offers a deal that's hard to beat.

For just $69, you get access to all the powerful features of Visual Composer (valued at $149), including the complete theme builder. But that's not all – you also receive a lifetime license for Ultimate Addons, along with hundreds of additional templates, blocks, and elements to supercharge your website's functionality.

Think of it as a comprehensive package that empowers you to unlock the full potential of your WordPress website without breaking the bank.

Getting Started with Ultimate Addons for Visual Composer

Getting started with Ultimate Addons for Visual Composer is easy. Simply follow these steps:

1. Purchase and download the addon from CodeCanyon.
2. In your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins > Add New.
3. Click "Upload Plugin," choose the addon file, and click "Install Now."
4. Once installed, click "Activate."

Once activated, you're all set! You can access the Ultimate Addons elements and templates right within the familiar Visual Composer interface and enjoy the enhanced capabilities and flexibility that Ultimate Addons offers for building and designing your WordPress website.

Ultimate Addons for Visual Composer: From Idea to Reality

Let's dive deeper into the journey of bringing the addon to life as we share insights from Lucas Selsek, the CEO of WPbuilders – the team behind well-known WordPress themes like TheFox and Cesis, operating under the name Tranmautritam.

The first rule of Fight Club states that you don't talk about Fight Club. The good news is that WordPress Builder Fight Club is a different breed. It is easy to join, you can talk about it, and there is no Brad Pitt to hold (kick) you back.

At WP Builders Fight Club, all major page builders and website builders compete in a fair game to show their performance and abilities.

What is WP Builders Fight Club?

WP Builders Fight Club is a community-driven project for page builders and website builders to compete in terms of performance, design, and other capabilities.

The idea is simple, you need to create a WordPress page. But not any kind of page - the page needs to follow the Fight Club guidelines and requirements. The requirements include technical specifications and design accuracy.

All pages created with different builders are then stored in a similar environment. This helps to measure the performance and receive unbiased results. The results include reports from GTMetrix and Google PageSpeed Insights.

The goal of the project is simple - have an honest and transparent comparison of all major WordPress builders in one place.

As of today, there are all major page builders and website builders presented, including Elementor, Builderius, Beaver Builder, and Visual Composer.

WP Builders Fight Club and Visual Composer

We decided to join WP Builder Fight Club with Visual Composer. Visual Composer Website Builder is a complete solution that allows you to build WordPress sites without using the styling of any WordPress themes.

Our goal was to complete the challenge to showcase the capabilities of our visual site builder while not compromising on performance.

Our solution consisted of Visual Composer, Advanced Custom Fields, and SVG Support. We also had Twenty Twenty-Three theme installed (per WordPress guidelines) but did not use it. What makes Visual Composer stand out is that we will not load any theme files if you are using Theme Builder to avoid theme footprints on performance.
The page layout was built using Visual Composer Theme Builder where you can design headers and footers. In the layout, we used Advanced Custom Fields for dynamic content and custom CSS for additional styling.

Since Visual Composer is a low-code solution, web developers and agencies can easily tweak the look and feel of their sites using custom CSS and JavaScript. In the Fight Club challenge, we used custom CSS to introduce pixel-perfect image overlap.

For the content part, we used Visual Composer free and premium elements from the Visual Composer Hub (cloud element library). The library consists of hundreds of content elements and integrations which reduces the need for additional plugins and add-ons.

Results

With Visual Composer, we managed to score 98 performance points in GTMetrix and Google PageSpeed Insights. The score on mobile was a bit lower (88 points) which means there is room for improvement.

We also reached 100 points in the structure and high scores for accessibility and SEO. To be fair, we did not work on the SEO score as a part of the Fight Club challenge. Jumping into Visual Composer Insights and data attributes can easily help you to get 100 points in SEO.

If we compare Visual Composer with other major builders on the market, we see that we have scored higher than some well-known players and are among the top solutions among builders when it comes to performance.

If you’re curious, you can learn more details about how exactly the page was replicated, what challenges we faced, and how we overcame them.

WordPress Gives A Hand is a charity event that has been taking place for the past three years. This year we are focusing our efforts on helping the WordPress community in Ukraine. In numbers, it makes up around 0.22% of it, if we estimate by sites built with WordPress in Ukraine. The majority of these are facing massive attacks. But it's much more than that.

Ukrainians have been fighting for their country for 8 years, 9 months, 3 weeks, and 3 days to this moment. It escalated on the 24th of February earlier this year. Being a small, family-culture company, it affects us deeply, to see our colleagues and friends facing these difficult situations every day. So we want to do anything and everything to help.

Being part of a community also means we support and encourage each other's ideas, beliefs, diversities and come together in difficult times. A community is like a tree with its roots, where damage to one part of the root system, affects the whole tree.

If you would like to support the WordPress community in Ukraine, there are several ways that you can get involved, and we will discuss them in this article.

About The WordPress Community in Ukraine

Ukraine is part of the European WordPress community, which began in 2013. From the very beginning, they were determined to make WordCamp Kyiv happen no matter what. With the first event taking place back in 2016.

Besides that, Ukrainian people are passionate about WordPress and the web in general, and actively host and organize WordPress meetups, conferences, and workshops all over the country regularly, despite all the odds working against them.

WordPress Events in Ukraine

• WordPress Kyiv with an impressive 46 events organized to this day, and close to 2,000 official participants
• WordPress Kitchen volunteer-organized conferences three years in a row, thanks to which WordCamp Kyiv was able to happen
• WordCamp Kyiv 2016 was the first official WordCamp in Ukraine with estimated 250 attendees
• WordCamp Kyiv 2019 where speakers themselves have said, they never saw any conference with that amount of questions from the audience
• WordCamp Kyiv 2020 that despite the pandemic and all of its limitations, was organized online by active community members Sabrina Zeidan, Vitaly Nikolaiev, and Volodymyr Samolotov

Made In Ukraine

As members of the WordPress community, we can support and benefit from one another by purchasing WordPress products and services made in Ukraine, or those that have a part of their employee base located in Ukraine.

In turn, we can also benefit from the high-quality products and services that are available. 

• Crocoblock offers a comprehensive suite of tools for building WordPress websites using Elementor and Gutenberg, some of which they offer for free
• TemplateMonster is a well-known digital marketplace that offers a wide range of themes, templates, plugins, and graphics for your WordPress website. 
• Zemez creates top-rated products for WordPress websites on the TemplateMonster and Envato marketplaces,  some of which are also free
• MotoPress specializes in the development of free and premium WordPress plugins and themes. Both for non-technical users as well as developers
• Dream Theme has been creating premium WordPress themes for over a decade. The team of just 8 people and has served almost 300,000 customers worldwide.

Last year in November we started an experiment - Yourday. The idea was simple: we would work four days a week, take one extra day off to pursue our own interests, and come back on Monday energized and fully rested.

Why 4 day work week?

We do what we preach, and we preach well-being and high performance for ourselves and our colleagues.

We relied on two core ideas:

1. We live in a fast-paced ever-changing world of too much. Five days a week is a long time to be at work, and two days is not enough time to relax and recharge.
2. In general human beings are very adaptive and respond well to stretching goals, so we can definitely achieve the same or even more in less time with sharper and more focused minds and energy.

Yourday experiment

We announced within the company, that we want to run the Yourday experiment for the next 6 months.

The hypothesis is stated a - Shorter workweek will have a positive effect on our happiness and productivity.

• Same pay. Everyone works one day less per week, but their pay is the same
• Fewer hours. Extra hours were not added on the other four days to make up for the "missing" day
• The same flexibility in working schedule
• No changes to the “work from anywhere” policy
• Make Friday #Yourday - do what you want on this day!

Conditions

• Support and product quality must stay at the same level or better
• We will evaluate productivity subjectively by discussion and reflections in each sprint
• Support needs to self-organize (agree on shifts). And as before development team needs to keep an eye on the support slack channel in case of something urgent comes up
• Thursdays are not the new Fridays

We were open, that if it even feels something is getting out of control, we will stop the experiment.

The initial response from the team was appreciative but with some concerns. Most got right away excited and a couple of team members weren't sure if it was going to work.

The next step was to actually start the experiment and see if it works.

Is working 4 days a week good?

After running the experiment for six months, we are ready to make some conclusions.

• Weekly productivity stayed the same. We have not out delivered or wowed ourselves, but we delivered to our clients what we planned and delighted them with a few extras
• Quality was not jeopardized. The number of critical errors went down. We kept our famous support at the highest level with a satisfaction rate above 90%
• We noticed everyone started to care more and be more proactive. We know this will help us to achieve better results in the long run
• All feel happier, and we all have more time for our hobbies and families
• Perhaps the best part is that we don't even miss those extra working hours.

Yes, we continue to pursue less is more and keep a four-day workweek.

We will keep on challenging ourselves to find ways of doing more with less time. And we encourage you to do the same!

Some reflections

Accept, that you will do less, but with better decision making and quality. Have a mix of quantitative and qualitative, subjective and objective metrics to follow.

If your product and process are in a bad shape, first commit as a team to sort this out. When you are part of a mess or tons of manual processes it is your responsibility to invest time and improve the situation.

It takes time to adjust. You will continue to plan more and stress about it. You need time to do an inventory of where you used to invest your time, and how can you work smarter to achieve more with less time. This challenge is for every individual and every team; do not expect someone will tell you how to do it. We are adults and if we want to make a work revolution we need to be able to sort this out.

One of the key arguments we hear from other companies is that flexible time is more important. We disagree, four-day workweek and flexible time are not substitutes for one another. Flexible time helps you to integrate work and private life better. The four-day workweek is the next level for our quality of life. Knowing you have three days to yourself with little to no chance to be involved in work makes wonder about your well-being.

Remember, only in 1929, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America Union was the first union to demand and receive a five-day workweek. The rest of the United States slowly followed, but it was not until 1940, when a provision of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act mandating a maximum 40-hour workweek went into effect, that the two-day weekend was adopted nationwide. Before that, the norm was around 48 hours per week (Saturdays included).

Context: We are a multinational, distributed team of 18 people total with 8 engineers, 3 support agents, and 4 marketers making international products.

How You Can Adapt To A No-Code Solution

If you are an agency creating websites purely from custom code, unless this is due to your client’s need for a very specific kind of function, there is no better time to migrate your processes to a no-code solution.

There are many solutions to choose from, Visual Composer is just one of many examples (if you’re looking down the WordPress route), where you can create entire page layouts in literally seconds with drag-and-drop.

To get started, we highly recommend redesigning your own website using a no-code solution, and upgrading to that amazing design you’ve always wanted, but never had the time to execute.

You may be following his daily musings through his #MorningCoffee newsletter or listened to his keynote at a WordCamp event. Or you know him simply as the Chief of Cloudways. Regardless, it's not that easy to find an evangelist of open source and Wordpress as vocal as Robert Jacobi.

Robert Jacobi has over 20 years of experience in sales and management. From early-career days founding Arc Technology Group, the lead Joomla consultancy. To becoming the President of Open Source Matters, an organization that supports the Joomla project. To his current position as Director of WordPress for Cloudways — Robert is by far one of the biggest contributors of the open-source as we know it today.

Today Robert shares his expert opinion on the WordPress community, Cloudways partnership with Visual Composer, and other interesting topics.

The Interview

Nikola: Your experience in the open-source community is almost 100 years in dog years. Tell us, how did you make the decision to go from Joomla to WordPress?

Robert: Well, that makes me feel older than I should but I guess that’s a fair assessment. When I first looked at what kind of open source CMS to utilize back in 2005, I was very focused on highly technical and object-oriented projects. With a team, we had built our own J2EE MVC framework and a CMS that sat on top of it. Very geeky stuff. Joomla had/has core technology that really spoke to us and we were able to leverage it for years. Of course, technologies continue to mature, user expectations change, and business moves in different directions. Moving to WordPress five years ago was all about WordPress being able to satisfy personal and professional needs, and the technology was accelerating. Gutenberg is a great example.

Nikola: Being one of the largest communities in the world, what factor, you'd say, makes the WordPress community so strong, united, and welcoming, from web creators with 10+ years of experience to complete newcomers?

Robert: I think you’ve answered the question in the question. Because the community is already so large, there are different points of access for folks with various skill levels and interests. From virtual conferences to webinars, to so much social media, there really is a place for everyone, and because it is an open-source community there is a very giving nature to newcomers.

Nikola: What do you think is the reason why Cloudways has become so popular over the years? What's the key to your success?

Robert: I feel that over the last decade Cloudways has looked to solve the really annoying technical problems for smart people who want to be doing other things. Managing, deploying, and maintaining a cloud infrastructure is absolutely doable for any individual, but is it a good use of your time? Do you really want to spend days, weeks, months, figuring out the intricacies of a certain cloud provider?

The key to our success is that we are a technology company focused on getting rid of the technology speed bumps. Of course with support and value.

Nikola: There have been increasingly more acquisitions within the open-source space over the years, with around 10 in the last two years alone. What are your thoughts on this current trend?

Robert: Just 10? I’m pretty sure that number is off by a factor of 10. There has really been significant movement in acquisitions! There is a ton of great software being managed and run by very small (or solo) folks. These projects though can have significant traction so of course being able to leverage great technology with a built-in user base is absolutely exciting for businesses looking to buy.

Nikola: With the frequent vulnerability threats, web security has been a heavy topic in the past few months especially. How can we as a community make sure our websites and data are secured?

Robert: The basics have never changed. Back up your sites and data. Test your backups in a separate environment – we make this easy at Cloudways. Keep your applications and stack up to date. We need to hold each other accountable as site owners, as hosts, and as application developers. There are great third-party tools to add to the layers of protection as well.

Nikola: With WEB3 rolling in, the everchanging Core Web Vitals and accessibility becoming a bigger thing by the day. What is the future of hosting for 2022?

Robert: The items you mentioned are all in the application stack and generally further away from hosting as most people think about it. But, I feel as hosts [hosting companies] all up their baseline products and services we will see either through internal development or acquisitions steps into those spaces.

Nikola: You have been a huge mental health advocate for remote workers, as well as participated in, and supported many charitable projects over the years. What are your thoughts on the open-source community and the World Wide Web itself, becoming more socially responsible, sustainable, and overall just a healthier environment for all who are a part of it?

Robert: Big Orange Heart and similar projects are more relevant than ever. Although Covid accelerated remote work, it has been seeing a rise over the past few years. Regarding social responsibility and the rest, it’s surprisingly always been there. I mean look at what the internet aspired to at “creation.” Distributed computing, with redundancy and accessibility. It’s a hugely democratic and empowering ideal. Open source projects in general are direct “children” of this ideal. The code is open and communities, especially at the beginning, support themselves very directly and have missions and goals that are not always just code.

Do I want WordPress to be a “political community?” No. But I think a community-driven mission can have health reverberations for the environment, for health, for mature discourse, for marginalized communities. It’s nice to see those things grow in relevance.

Nikola: Cloudways is participating in the WPGivesAHand charity movement this year, what are your thoughts on such initiatives within the WordPress community?

Robert: Ha! I think I just covered it above. I mean each one of us, person, agency, host, is part of the WordPress community and trying to take part in such initiatives. It’s great! We often see companies with specific charities (we participate in the Million Tree Challenge) but something like WPGivesAHand can have multiplier effects.

Nikola: Finally the topic we all have been waiting for - Cloudways has partnered with many amazing companies over the years. Why should potential users choose the Cloudways + Visual Composer bundle, and what's the value to the users?

Robert: It’s more than the here and now, it’s the critical wave of the future. No-code / low-code is what people want, and Visual Composer with an insanely smart and intuitive way to create websites and applications, as well as the ongoing maintenance and support of them is a no-brainer.

With the Cloudways + Visual Composer bundle, we are taking the best of powerful and easy-to-use hosting and adding the powerful and easy-to-build capability in a 1-click solution. It’s perfect.

Rapid Fire Round

Ending Thoughts

Nikola: Thank you so much for taking the time to educate us on such fun and interesting topics. What would you wish for all the readers, web creators, designers, and developers in 2022?

Robert: Stay healthy! Mentally, emotionally, physically. It’s been a challenging few years in ways none of us expected but being healthy in all those ways will make it possible to be curious

It's another year around and we are thrilled to look back at what has happened to Visual Composer in 2021.

This year, we released new features for web creators, built a stronger community, launched partnership programs, and more.